Sukhdev Sandhu on the waspish and prophetic rage of the dissident
artist Ai Weiwei, whose Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants
2006-2009 has just been published.

By Sukhdev Sandhu

2:31PM BST 16 Aug 2011

Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist who helped design the Beijing National Stadium for the 2008 Olympics and who was detained without explanation by the police for two months this spring, is best known internationally as an artist. Within China, however, he’s at least as famous for his writing. Between 2006 and 2009, he maintained a blog, updated as often as seven times a day, which, before it was finally shut down by the authorities, comprised more than 2,700 posts and thousands of photographs.

To his many devoted readers, Ai’s essays on aesthetics, urban planning and current affairs represented not just an assertion of critical independence that compared favourably with the supine quietism of much of the Chinese mainstream press, but an ongoing archive of cultural resistance.

Ai’s earliest entries are often preoccupied with architectural and artistic issues. Embracing his outsider status – his father, Ai Qing, a poet, was branded an “enemy of the people” during the Cultural Revolution and relocated with his young family to an earthen pit in China’s “little Siberia” – he values art not for its role in preserving traditions, but for its power to question received notions and to liberate individuals. He calls this creed Modernism and argues: “An artwork unable to make people feel uncomfortable or to feel different is not one worth creating.”

Little wonder, then, that he’s scornful of Chinese painting, “a medium that has yet to emerge from the childish practices of academia or the unctuous mire of the pseudo-literati”, or that he mocks the Ministry of Culture for its desire to manufacture a standardised idea of public culture by establishing a Chinese Broadway full of outdoor theatres and hundreds of film screens.

Too many of the nation’s cities, he argues, are spectacles designed to advertise a flawed idea of progress rather than being built for the wellbeing of their inhabitants.

A key symbol of this masquerade was the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics (in which Ai had played a part, as a consultant to the architectural consortium responsible for the so-called “Bird’s Nest” stadium). Nevertheless, the ceremony was “a visual crap pile of phoney affection and hypocritical unction” that represented “the ultimate rendering of a culture under centralised state power, an encyclopedia of spiritual subjugation”.

At a time when the global business class was chattering breathlessly about China’s growing prosperity, Ai’s blog consistently drew attention to the spectre of another China – one populated by hundreds of millions of unpapered emigrants, evicted villagers, exploited labourers.

His posts give voice to those individuals who dared to shout out against the corruption and cruelties of the ruling authorities: Yang Jia, a working-class young man brutalised by the police who was executed after going on a revenge killing spree; Martin Jahnke, a student who interrupted a speech by Premier Wen Jiabao at Cambridge University.

By 2008, Ai’s own voice, formerly witty and waspish, had become Swiftian in its rage. The central government’s faltering response to a massive earthquake in Sichuan province was one factor, but more disappointing still was the relative lack of criticism meted out to it from “those ignorant and muddled, incompetent dog-fart patriotic lawyers or the penile media”.

Attracting millions of comments from supporters and detractors alike, Ai’s blog can be seen as an alternative social space where the future of China was endlessly imagined and fought over.

In this respect, the site, whose entries were constantly deleted, erased and attacked, mirrored the living conditions in those Chinese cities whose embattled communities it often chronicled.

The final entries, which document the near-comic efforts of the state to silence Ai, read almost prophetically: “What can they do to me? Nothing more than to banish, kidnap or imprison me. Perhaps they could fabricate my disappearance into thin air.”

Excellently translated and annotated, this volume is an enthralling introduction to Ai’s artistic concerns; more than that, it is an invaluable portal into Chinese dissident culture.